This past week a fast-moving weather system knocked out power to more than three million electricity customers in the Mid-Atlantic region.  The outage comes on the heels of the massive Hurricane Irene-related service interruptions last fall.  Almost a week after the storms, hundreds of thousands of consumers remain without power.  To make matters worse, a record-setting heat wave is affecting the regions hit by the outages.  Consumers are seething, both literally and figuratively, looking hard for solutions, and ready to demand that their electric utilities implement those solutions.

Distributed energy storage (DES) is unquestionably one of those solutions.  While it is not a perfect answer for the problem of storm-related outages—four hours or so of additional power cannot offset a service interruption lasting several days—it is a better solution than it may first appear. 

DES is flexible, allowing consumers options for dealing with service interruptions.  Affected consumers can use stored electricity for full power during a limited period or can choose to allocate power to more critical systems, thereby extending their time of access to electricity.  In the worst case, stored power can allow consumers time to plan for how to deal with an extended outage.  These options would have been more than a little appreciated by the millions of consumers who have been thrown into heat and darkness without warning over the past week.

Consumer demand for electricity reliability is the key to building a near-term market for DES in the United States.  Turning that demand into a market, however, is something that the storage industry must do for itself.  For the past year, NAATBatt has been advocating a “Got Juice?” campaign, to educate consumers angered by outages about the benefits of DES. 

The time to get serious about this is now.  As an industry we seem to have fallen into a funk fueled by news of business bankruptcies and Seeking Alpha articles bashing storage technology.  In truth, we are sitting on a multi-billion dollar market just waiting to happen.  The opportunity is there—dark, sweltering and angry.  As an industry, we just need to seize it.